If artist Nayland Blake could make it here, why did he move to N.Y?

David Bonetti, EXAMINER ART CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, September 12, 1996

1996-09-12 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Nayland Blake, San Francisco's leading contender for art world stardom during the late '80s and '90s, has moved to New York. What makes that news startling is that, in the many roles he played locally as artist, curator, writer and teacher, Blake has always been an outspoken advocate for Bay Area artists and the Bay Area as a place to make art.

Blake's San Francisco years - he moved here in 1984 - were crowned this year with the completion of

"Constellation," a monumental public artwork in the central staircase of the New Main Library that reworks the tradition of listing names of the "greats" in public buildings, expanding the notion to include writers from cultures and traditions often overlooked. His most ambitious work to date, the commission was a major endorsement of his frequently challenging work.

As an artist, Blake is impossible to pigeonhole. His changeability, his willingness to make surrealist-tinged objects of suppressed menace one season and perform tasks in a rabbit suit the next, might be his greatest triumph in an art world where easy identifiability is the norm. (He has admitted that in following his own drummer, he "might have sacrificed short-term clarity." ) But whatever form his work takes, one constant is his desire to confront and engage the world.

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For a viewer, dealing with a Nayland Blake is never easy. He makes you work your mind and your heart as well as your eyes. After you identify his references - and they can come from, among other sources, popular music, the movies, art, political and psychological theory, both high and low literature and the insider codes of queer culture - you have to figure out how you feel about what he's done to them. If you "get" it - and he has made pieces I haven't gotten at all - the experience can be intellectually and emotionally satisfying, as well as visually arresting.

IN AN INTERVIEW before he left, at Millennium, a vegetarian restaurant in the Abigail Hotel that is a favorite of his, Blake, 36, spoke frankly about why he was moving back to the city where he grew up and about some of the problems that prevent the Bay Area from fulfilling its promise culturally. He showed up affecting the slightly bearish mode he has favored recently. Over the years, his appearance has been as diverse as his art work. He has played the slim, long-haired dandy in a velvet suit as well as Princess Coco, a trashy material girl wearing black lipstick.

"I've done what I came here to do personally, and I feel like I've done as much as I can do here," he said. "I've just gotten through with some big projects (such as the Library piece), and I feel like it's a good time to go.

"But I think there are troublesome issues about being an artist in the Bay Area," he continued. "Although it's a good place for artists starting out, it's a difficult place for mature artists. On the whole, the city's relationship to culture is not an active one. San Francisco likes to have culture more than it likes to make culture.

"The success stories here are things like "Beach Blanket Babylon,' like the Grateful Dead. Basically, San Francisco likes the standards. You're going to get exactly what you expect here and it's going to continue that way indefinitely. And that's problematic for me in the long run.

"In visual art terms, look at an artist like Frank Stella, who made a radical break in the late '70s. That's not the kind of move you'd expect from an artist in the Bay Area. Here, that kind of change is perceived as somehow wrong. Of course, that kind of activity in the art world as a whole does make people nervous. Look at the problem Bruce Nauman had getting understood."

Nauman, who came to maturity as an artist in San Francisco in the '60s, is noted for making work that took radically different forms. "The art world has a tendency to trademark things.

"You have to make a distinction between what you need as an artist at different points in your life," Blake reflected. "San Francisco is an accepting environment. It's also very livable - people talk about how expensive it is, but in some ways it's less expensive than other cities. It's open to people inventing something, trying something out.

"The problem comes later on. San Francisco doesn't have an ongoing cultural dialogue that is geared to pushing people," he stated. And for a conceptual artist like Blake, whose work trades in ideas, a sharp critical discourse is necessary to keep the work from going soft.

"The flip side of that acceptance I think is a potential for trivialization. In San Francisco, we accept everything, but that means we don't really care about anything."

IN 1991 BLAKE was sitting on top of the art world, although, since the go-go '80s art world had just crashed, that wasn't as enviable a spot as it had been only a season or two before. Mary Boone was courting him for her gallery, and the New York Times co-featured him in a Sunday story about the new post-crash artists. It might have been the perfect time for Blake to have moved to the Apple, but he stayed put. I asked him why.

"If I had moved then," he said, "It would have been accepting other people's definition of who I was, when that was very limited. I had just got involved in a relationship (with writer and performance artist Philip Horvitz) that means a great deal to me, and I couldn't leave then without him. At that time, there was also an explosion of energy among artists in a certain segment of the gay community that really fed me a great deal, that was really valuable and necessary, and I didn't want to leave that.

"I think of my time here as divided into a couple of phases: There was the nonprofit arts, South of Market Street phase (Blake was head of the curatorial committee at New Langton Arts for several years), and then there was the queer phase (which culminated in the ground-breaking exhibition of work by gay artists, "In a Different Light," he co-curated for the University Art Museum in 1995).

"I think there'll probably be another wave of things coming along, but I don't see it as my need to be part of it. The critical energy in the Bay Area is often organized around youth. That energy is powerful, but it always has the same tone. I see a danger in continually linking myself to that youthful energy. I've been precocious all my life, but now I'm into no longer being precocious!"

Despite his dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the local scene, Blake reflected on the positive changes he had witnessed.

"When I first arrived here in 1984, the various segments of the art world were all locked into their own orbits, and there was no communication between them. And that was really deadening, a self-perpetuating ghettoization within the art world itself. Starting around '86, '87, almost every art institution in town had at least a 50 percent staff turnover. Suddenly, there was a whole new batch of people who didn't know the rules and there was much more mobility.

"So you had situations like John Caldwell (the late SFMOMA curator) going to galleries South of Market because he didn't know you weren't supposed to go there. When (SFMOMA director) Jack Lane showed up at a Langton event, everyone was shocked. There was a whole wave of people who didn't have an entrenched mentality who really helped change things.

"Now, the new SFMOMA and the Center for the Arts are both facing the same dilemma. Both are an apotheosis of a certain tendency in the arts, and now that each has arrived, what do they do next? Culture doesn't occur in static institutions, it occurs in active ones. I have no doubt that some interesting solutions will come out of the situation, but it is a major dilemma right now for the city culturally.

"A satisfactory solution is more crucial for the Center. SFMOMA, after all, is just a museum, and it is behaving like a museum OK. But because it's devoted to multiculturalism, the Center carries greater expectations than SFMOMA. How do you engage in that discussion at a sophisticated level, one that honors complexity and redresses historical slights that are very real and need to be redressed. You can't erase 300 years of slavery with 10 years of affirmative action!"

IT MIGHT surprise some to hear Blake say, "Part of the reason I want to go to New York is that it's a much blacker city." It might surprise some to learn that Blake is, by the old definition of race, black. Indeed, his "coming out" as a person of multiracial background was one of the interesting developments in his work during the past couple of years.

"I started to deal with race in my work when I was trying to come to terms with the idea of the father. Dealing with race has been a way of addressing the guilt I've experienced for receiving privilege for being perceived as white," he stated.

"My upbringing was only tangential to black identification. We were raised in a race-neutral way. I was going to a public school in Manhattan that was racially mixed, and it just wasn't an issue. Then I went to a private school where it was, but that was it until now.

"What's consistent in my working with racial or queer issues is that I have never said, "This work tells you what it's like to be gay,' or "This is what gay people think about such and such,' " he said. "Similarly, I don't think of my work about race to be any sort of statement of "This is what interracial people think.' I don't think art works that way, anyway."

Blake will continue to have a presence in the Bay Area. He has recently joined Gallery Paule Anglim, and his work is in collections of both SFMOMA and the University Art Museum. And there is his dramatic public art statement in the New Main Library.

What will this protean artist do next? "My big discovery of the past year has been (early 19th century Japanese printmaker) Hokusai," Blake said. "I'm doing more drawings. I think my new work might be page-oriented." &lt;